LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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THE METHOD OF NATURE. 


AN 


ORATION, 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE 



SOCIETY OF THE ADELPHI, 



IN WATERVILLE COLLEGE, IN MAINE, 



AUGUST 11, 1841, 



BY 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



BOSTON : 
SAMUEL G. SIMPK1NS 



1841. 






•■■-. .?'-; 



THE METHOD OF NATURE. 



AN 



ORATION, 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE 



SOCIETY OF THE ADELPHI, 



IN WATERVILLE COLLEGE, IN MAINE, 



AUGUST 11, 1841, 



BY / 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



BOSTON : 
SAMUEL G. SIMPK1NS 

Hs 

1841. 






$ 



Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1841, by 

Samuel^G. Simpkins, 
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Massachusetts. 



V 



BOSTON; 

Printed by l3aac B. Butts, 

No. 2 School Street. 



ORATION. 



Gentlemen : 

Let us exchange congratulations on 
the enjoyments and the promises of this day and 
this hour. A literary anniversary is a celebration of 
the intellect, and so the inlet of a great force into 
the assembly of the learned, and through them into 
the world. The land we live in has no interest so 
dear, if it knew its want, as the fit consecration of 
days of reason and thought. Where there is no 
vision, the people perish. The scholars are the 
priests of that thought which establishes the founda- 
tions of the earth. No matter what is their special 
work or profession, they stand for the spiritual 
interest of the world, and it is a common calamity if 
they neglect their post in a country where the ma- 
terial interest is so predominant as it is in America. 
We hear something too much of the results of ma- 
chinery, commerce, and the useful arts. We are a 
puny and a fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and 
following, are our diseases. The rapid wealth 
which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, 



4 



or by the incessant expansions of our population 
and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest ; the luck 
of one is the hope of thousands, and the proximity 
of the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold 
mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, 
the house, and the very body and feature of man. 

I do not wish to look with sour aspect at the in- 
dustrious manufacturing village, or the mart of 
commerce. 1 love the music of the water-wheel ; 
I value the railway ; I feel the pride which the sight 
of a ship inspires ; I look on trade and every me- 
chanical craft as education also. But let me dis- 
criminate what is precious herein. There is in each 
of these works one act of invention, one intellectual 
step, or short series of steps taken ; that act or step 
is the spiritual act : all the rest is mere repetition of 
the same a thousand times. And I will not be de- 
ceived into admiring the routine of handicrafts and 
mechanics, how splendid soever the result, any more 
than I admire the routine of the scholars or clerical 
class. That splendid results ensue from the labors 
of stupid men, is the fruit of higher laws than their 
will, and the routine is not to be praised for it. I 
would not have the laborer sacrificed to the splendid 
result, — I would not have the laborer sacrificed to 
my convenience and pride, nor to that of a great 
class of such as me. Let there be worse cotton 
and better men. The weaver should not be bereaved 
of that nobility which comes from the superiority to 
his work, and the knowledge that the product or the 
skill is a momentary end of no value, except so far 



as it embodies his spiritual prerogatives. If 1 see 
nothing to admire in the unit, shall I admire a mill- 
ion units ? Men stand in awe of the city, but do 
not honor any individual citizen ; and are continu- 
ally yielding to this dazzling result of numbers, that 
which they would never yield to the solitary exam- 
ple of any one. 

Whilst, therefore, the multitude of men live to 
degrade each other, and give currency to desponding 
doctrines, the scholar must be a bringer of hope, 
and must reinforce man against himself. I some- 
times believe that our literary anniversaries will 
presently assume a greater importance, as the eyes 
of men open to their capabilities. Here, a new set 
of distinctions, a new order of ideas, prevail. Here, 
we set a bound to the respectability of wealth, and 
a bound to the pretensions of the law and the 
church. The bigot must cease to be a bigot to-day. 
Into our charmed circle, power cannot enter ; and 
the sturdiest defender of existing institutions feels 
the terrific inflammability of this air which condenses 
heat in every corner that may restore to the ele- 
ments the fabrics of ages. Nothing solid is secure ; 
everything tilts and rocks. Even the scholar is not 
safe ; he too is searched and revised. Is his learn- 
ing dead ? Is he living in his memory ? The pow- 
er of mind is not mortification, but life. But come 
forth, thou curious child ! hither, thou loving, all- 
hoping poet ! hither, thou tender, doubting heart, 
who hast not yet found any place in the world's 
market fit for thee ; any wares which thou couldst 



buy or sell, — so large is thy love and ambition, — 
thine and not theirs is the hour. Smooth thy brow, 
and hope and love on, for the kind heaven justifies 
thee, and the whole world feels that thou only art in 
the right. 

We ought to celebrate this hour by expressions of 
manly joy. Not thanks, not prayer seem quite the 
highest or truest name for our communication with 
the infinite, — but glad and conspiring reception, ■ — 
reception that becomes giving in its turn, as the re- 
ceiver is only the All-Giver in part and in infancy. 
I cannot, — nor can any man, — speak precisely of 
things so sublime, but it seems to me, the wit of man, 
his strength, his grace, his tendency, his art, is the 
grace and the presence of God. It is beyond ex- 
planation. When all is said and done, the rapt saint 
is found the only logician. Not exhortation, not 
argument becomes our lips, but paeans of joy and 
praise. But not of adulation : we are too nearly 
related in the deep of the mind to that we honor, 
It is God in us which checks the language of petition 
by a grander thought. In the bottom of the heart, 
it is said ; ' I am, and by me, O child ! this fair 
body and world of thine stands and grows. I am ; 
all things are mine : and all mine are thine.' 

The festival of the intellect, and the return to its 
source, cast a strong light on the always interesting 
topics of Man and Nature. We are forcibly re- 
minded of the old want. There is no man ; there 
hath never been. The Intellect still asks that a man 
may be born. The flame of life flickers feebly in 



human breasts. We demand of men a richness and 
universality we do not find. Great men do not con- 
tent us. It is their solitude, not their force, that 
makes them conspicuous. There is somewhat in- 
digent and tedious about them. They are poorly 
tied to one thought. If they are prophets, they are 
egotists ; if polite and various, they are shallow. 
How tardily men arrive at any thought ! how tardily 
they pass from it to another thought ! The crystal 
sphere of thought is as concentrical as the geological 
structure of the globe. As all our soils and rocks 
lie in strata, concentric strata, so do all men's think- 
ings run laterally, never vertically. Here comes by 
a great inquisitor with auger and plumb-line, and 
will bore an Artesian well through all our conventions 
and theories, and pierce to the core of things. But 
as soon as he probes one crust, behold gimlet, plumb- 
line, and philosopher, all take a lateral direction, in 
spite of all resistance, as if some strong wind took 
everything off its feet, and if you come month after 
month to see what progress our reformer has made, 
— not an inch has he pierced, — you still find him 
with new words in the old place, floating about in 
new parts of the same old vein or crust. The new 
book says, ' I will give you the key to nature,' and 
we expect to go like a thunderbolt to the centre. 
But the thunder is a surface phenomenon, makes a 
skin-deep cut, and so does the sage. The wedge 
turns out to be a rocket. Thus a man lasts but a 
very little while, for his monomania becomes insup- 
portably tedious in a few months. It is so with 



every book and person : and yet — and yet — we 
do not take up a new book, or meet a new man 
without a pulse-beat of expectation. And this dis- 
content with the poor and pinched result, this invin- 
cible hope of a more adequate interpreter, is the 
sure prediction of his advent. 

In the absence of man we turn to nature, which 
stands next. In the divine order, intellect is primary : 
nature, secondary : it is the memory of the mind. 
That which once existed in intellect as pure law, 
has now taken body as Nature. It existed already 
in the mind in solution : now, it has been precipi- 
tated, and the bright sediment is the world. We can 
never be quite strangers or inferiors in nature. We 
are parties to its existence ; it is flesh of our flesh, 
and bone of our bone. But we no longer hold it 
by the hand : we have lost our miraculous power : 
our arm is no more as strong as the frost ; nor our 
will equivalent to gravity and the elective attractions. 
Yet we can use nature as a convenient standard, 
and the meter of our rise and fall. It has this ad- 
vantage as a witness, — it will not lie, it cannot be 
debauched. When man curses, nature still testifies 
to truth and love. We may, therefore, safely study 
the mind in nature, because we cannot steadily gaze 
on it in mind ; as we explore the face of the sun in 
a pool, when our eyes cannot brook his direct 
splendors. 

It seems to me, therefore, that it were some suit- 
able psean, if we should piously celebrate this hour 
by exploring the method of nature. Let us see that, 



as nearly as we can, and try how far it is transfera- 
ble to the literary life. Every earnest glance we 
give to the realities around us, with intent to learn, 
proceeds from a holy impulse, and is really songs of 
praise. What difference can it make whether it 
take the shape of exhortation, or of passionate ex- 
clamation, or of scientific statement ? These are 
forms merely. Through them we express, at last, 
the fact, that God has done thus or thus. 

In treating a subject so large, in which we must 
necessarily appeal to the intuition, and aim much 
more to suggest, than to describe, I know it is not 
easy to speak with the precision attainable on topics 
of less scope. I have no taste for partial statements : 
they disgust me also. I do not wish in attempting 
to paint a man, to decribe an air-fed, unimpassioned, 
impossible ghost. My eyes and ears are revolted by 
any neglect of the physical facts, the limitations of 
man. And yet one who conceives the true order of 
nature, and beholds the visible as proceeding from 
the invisible, cannot state his thought, without seem- 
ing to those who study the physical laws, to do them 
some injustice. There is an intrinsic defect in the 
organ. Language overstates. Statements of the 
infinite are usually felt to be unjust to the finite, and 
blasphemous. Empedocles undoubtedly spoke a 
truth of thought, when he said, ' I am God ;' but 
the moment it was out of his mouth, it became a lie 
to the ear ; and the world revenged itself for the 
seeming arrogance, by the good story about his shoe. 
How can I hope for better hap in my attempts to 
2 



10 



enunciate spiritual facts ? Thus only ; as far as I 
share the influx of truth, so far shall I be felt by 
every true person to say what is just. 

The method of nature : who could ever analyse 
it ? That rushing stream will not stop to be ob- 
served. We can never surprise nature in a corner ; 
never find the end of a thread ; never tell where to 
set the first stone. The bird hastes to lay her egg : 
the egg hastens to be a bird. The wholeness we 
admire in the order of the world, is the result of 
infinite distribution. Its smoothness is the smooth- 
ness of the pitch of the cataract. Its permanence 
is a perpetual inchoation. Every natural fact is an 
emanation, and that from which it emanates is an 
emanation also, and from every emanation is a new 
emanation. If anything could stand still, it would 
be crushed and dissipated by the torrent it resisted, 
and if it were a mind, would be crazed ; as insane 
persons are those who hold fast to one thought, and 
do not flow with the course of nature. Not the 
cause, but an ever novel effect, nature descends al- 
ways from above. It is unbroken obedience. The 
beauty of these fair objects is imported into them 
from a metaphysical and eternal spring. In all 
animal and vegetable forms, the physiologist con- 
cedes that no chemistry, no mechanics can account 
for the facts, but a mysterious principle of life must 
be assumed, which not only inhabits the organ, but 
makes the organ. 

How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet 
without place to insert an atom, — in graceful sue- 



11 



cession, in equal fulness, in balanced beauty, the 
dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an odor 
of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is 
inexact and boundless. It will not be dissected, 
nor unravelled, nor shown. Away profane philoso- 
pher ! seekest thou in nature the cause ? This re- 
fers to that, and that to the next, and the next to the 
third, and everything refers. Thou must ask in 
another mood, thou must feel it and love it, thou 
must behold it in a spirit as grand as that by which 
it exists, ere thou canst know the law. Known it 
will not be, but gladly beloved and enjoyed. 

The simultaneous life throughout the whole body, 
the equal serving of innumerable ends without the 
least emphasis or preference to any, but the steady 
degradation of each to the success of all, allows the 
understanding no place to work. Nature can only 
be conceived as existing to a universal and not to 
a particular end, to a universe of ends, and not to 
one, — a work of ecstasy, to be represented by a 
circular movement, as intention might be signified 
by a straight line of definite length. Each effect 
strengthens every other. There is no revolt in all 
the kingdoms from the commonweal : no detach- 
ment of an individual. Hence the catholic charac- 
ter which makes every leaf an exponent of the world. 
When we behold the landscape in a poetic spirit, we 
do not reckon individuals. Nature knows neither 
palm nor oak, but only vegetable life, which sprouts 
into forests, and festoons the globe with a garland of 
grass and vines. 



12 



That no single end may be selected and nature 
judged thereby, appears from this, that if man himself 
be considered as the end, and it be assumed that the 
final cause of the world is to make holy or wise 
or beautiful men, we see that it has not succeeded. 
Read alternately in natural and in civil history, a 
treatise of astronomy, for example, with a volume 
of French Memoir es pour servir. When we have 
spent our wonder in computing this wasteful hospi- 
tality with which boon nature turns off new firma- 
ments without end into her wide common, as fast as 
the madrepores make coral, — suns and planets hos- 
pitable to souls,- — and then shorten the sight to look 
into this court of Louis Quatorze, and see the game 
that is played there, — duke and marshal, abbe and 
madame, — a gambling table where each is laying 
traps for the other, where the end is ever by some 
lie or fetch to outwit your rival and ruin him with 
this solemn fop in wig and stars - — the king ; one 
can hardly help asking if this planet is a fair speci- 
men of the so generous astronomy, and if so, wheth- 
er the experiment haye hot failed, and whether it 
be quite worth while to make more, and glut the inno- 
cent space with so poor an article. 

I think we feel not much otherwise if, instead of 
beholding foolish nations, we take the great and wise 
men, the eminent souls, and narrowly inspect their 
biography. None of them seen by himself — and 
his performance compared with his promise or idea, 
will justify the cost of that enormous apparatus of 
means by which this spotted and defective person 
was at last procured. 



13 



To questions of this sort, nature replies, ' I grow, 
I grow.' All is nascent, infant. When we are 
dizzied with the arithmetic of the savant toiling to 
compute the length of her line, the return of her 
curve, we are steadied by the perception that a great 
deal is doing ; that all seems just begun ; remote 
aims are in active accomplishment. We can point 
nowhere to anything final ; but tendency appears on 
all hands : planet, system, constellation, total nature 
is growing like a field of maize in July ; is becoming 
somewhat else ; is in rapid metamorphosis. The 
embryo does not more strive to be man than yon- 
der burr of light we call a nebula tends to be a ring, 
a comet, a globe, and parent of new stars. Why 
should not then these messieurs of Versailles strut 
and plot for tabourets and ribbons, for a season, 
without prejudice to their faculty to run on better 
errands by and by ? 

But nature seems further to reply, ' I have ven- 
tured so great a stake as my success, in no single 
creature. I have not yet arrived at any end. The 
gardener aims to produce a fine peach or pear, but 
my aim is the health of the whole tree, — root, stem, 
leaf, flower, and seed, — and by no means the pam- 
pering of a monstrous pericarp at the expense of all 
the other functions,' 

In short, the spirit and peculiarity of that impress- 
ion nature makes on us, is this, that it does not exist 
to any one or to any number of particular ends, 
but to numberless and endless benefit, that there is 
in it no private will, no rebel leaf or limb, but the 



14 



whole is oppressed by one superincumbent tendency, 
obeys that redundancy or excess of life which in 
conscious beings we call ecstasy. 

With this conception of the genius or method of 
nature, let us go back to man. It is true, he pre- 
tends to give account of himself to himself, but, at 
the last, what has he to recite but the fact that there 
is a Life not to be described or known otherwise 
than by possession ? What account can he give of 
his essence more than so it ivas to be f The royal 
reason, the Grace of God seems the only descrip- 
tion of our multiform but ever identical fact. 
There is virtue, there is genius, there is success, or 
there is not. There is the incoming or the reced- 
ing of God : that is all we can affirm ; and we can 
show neither how nor why. Self-accusation, re- 
morse, and the didactic morals of self-denial and 
strife with sin, is a view we are constrained by our 
constitution to take of the fact seen from the plat- 
form of action ; but seen from the platform of in- 
tellection, there is nothing for us but praise and 
wonder. 

The fact of facts is the termination of the world 
in a man. This appears to be the last victory of 
intelligence. The universal does not attract us 
until housed in an individual. Who heeds the waste 
abyss of possibility ? The ocean is everywhere the 
same, but it has no character until seen with the 
shore or the ship. Who would value any number 
of miles of Atlantic brine bounded by lines of lati- 
tude and longitude ? Confine it by granite rocks, 



15 



let it wash a shore where wise men dwell, and it is 
filled with expression ; and the point of greatest 
interest is where the land and water meet. So must 
we admire in man, the form of the formless, the 
concentration of the vast, the house of reason, the 
cave of memory. See the play of thoughts ! what 
nimble gigantic creatures are these ! what saurians, 
what palaiotheria shall be named with these agile 
movers ? The great Pan of old, who was clothed 
in a leopard skin to signify the beautiful variety of 
things and the firmament, his coat of stars, — was but 
the representative of thee, O rich and various Man ! 
thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy 
senses the morning and the night and the unfathom- 
able galaxy $ in thy brain, the geometry of the City 
of God ; in thy heart, the bower of love and the 
realms of right and wrong. An individual man is a 
fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and 
ripen. He is strong not to do, but to live ; not in 
his arms, but in his heart ; not as an agent, but as a 
fact. The history of the genesis or the old mythol- 
ogy repeats itself in the experience of every child. 
He too is a demon or god thrown into a particular 
chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from 
disorder into order; Each individual soul is such, in 
virtue of its being a power to translate the world 
into some particular language of its own ; if not 
into a picture, a statue, or a dance, — why, then, 
into a trade, an art, a science, a mode of living, a 
conversation, a character, an influence. You admire 
pictures, but it is as impossible for you to paint a 



16 



right picture as for grass to bear apples. But when 
the genius comes, it makes fingers : it is pliancy, 
and the power of transferring the affair in the street 
into oils and colors. Raphael must be born, and 
Salvator must be born. 

There is no attractiveness like that of a new man. 
The sleepy nations are occupied with their political 
routine. England, France and America read Par- 
liamentary Debates, which no high genius now enliv- 
ens ; and nobody will read them who trusts his own 
eye : only they who are deceived by the popular 
repetition of distinguished names. But when Na- 
poleon unrols his map, the eye is commanded by 
original power. When Chatham leads the debate, 
men may well listen, because they must listen. A 
man, a personal ascendency is the only great phe- 
nomenon. When nature has work to be done, she 
creates a genius to do it. Follow the great man, 
and you shall see what the world has at heart in 
these ages. There is no omen like that. 

But what strikes us in the fine genius is that which 
belongs of right to every one. Let us speak plainly 
and with no false humility. The humility which is 
the ornament of man in the presence of the ideal 
good and fair, is not to cloud his perception of that 
energy which he is. A man should know himself 
for a necessary actor. A link was wanting between 
two craving parts of nature, and he was hurled into 
being as the bridge over that yawning need, the 
mediator betwixt two else unmarriageable facts. 
His two parents held each of one of the wants, and 



17 



the union of foreign constitutions in him enables 
him to do gladly and gracefully what the assembled 
human race could not have sufficed to do. He 
knows his own materials ; everywhere he applies 
himself to his work ; he cannot read, he cannot 
think, he cannot look, but he unites the hitherto 
separated strands into a perfect cord. What are 
the thoughts we utter but the reason of our incar- 
nation ? To utter these thoughts we took flesh, 
missionaries of the everlasting word which will be 
spoken. Should not a man be sacred to himself and 
to men ? Is it for him to account himself cheap 
and superfluous, or to linger by the wayside for op- 
portunities ? Did he not come into being because 
something must be done which he and no other is 
and does ? If only he sees, the world will be visible 
enough. He need not study where to stand, nor to 
put things in favorable lights ; in him is the light, from 
him all things are to their centre illuminated. What 
patron shall he ask for employment and reward ? 
Hereto was he born, to deliver the thought of his 
heart from the universe to the universe, to do an 
office which nature could not forego, nor he be dis- 
charged from rendering, and then immerge again 
into the holy silence and eternity out of which as a 
man he arose. God is rich, and many more men 
than one he harbors in his bosom, biding their time 
and the needs and the beauty of all. Is not this the 
theory of every man's genius or faculty ? Why then 
goest thou as some Boswell or listening worshipper 
to this saint or to that ? That is the only lese-ma- 
3 



13 



jesty. Here art thou with whom so long the universe 
travailed in labor ; darest thou think meanly of thy- 
self whom the stalwart Fate brought forth to unite 
his ragged sides, to shoot the gulf, — to reconcile the 
irreconcilable ? 

Whilst a necessity so great caused the man to 
exist, his health and erectness consist in the fidelity 
with which he transmits influences from the vast and 
universal to the point on which his genius can act. 
The ends are momentary : they are vents for the 
current of inward life which increases as it is spent. 
A man's wisdom is to know that all ends are mo- 
mentary, that the best end must instantly be super- 
seded by a better. But there is a mischievous ten- 
dency in him to transfer his thought from the life to 
the ends, to quit his agency and rest in his acts : 
the tool runs away with the workman, the human 
with the divine. I conceive a man as always spok- 
en to from behind, and unable to turn his head and 
see the speaker. In all the millions who have heard 
the voice, none ever saw the face. As children in 
their play run behind each other, and seize one by 
the ears and make him walk before them, so is the 
spirit our unseen pilot. That well-known voice 
speaks in all languages, governs all men, and none 
ever caught a glimpse of its form. If the man will 
exactly obey it, it will adopt him, so that he shall not 
any longer separate it from himself in his thought, 
he shall seem to be it, he shall be it. If he listen 
with insatiable ears, richer and greater wisdom is 
taught him, the sound swells to a ravishing music, 



19 



he is borne away as with a flood, he becomes careless 
of his food and of his house, he is the fool of ideas, 
and leads a heavenly life. But if his eye is set on 
the things to be done, and not on the truth that is 
still taught, and for the sake of which the things are 
to be done, then the voice grows faint, and at last is 
but a humming in his ears. His health and great- 
ness consist in his being the channel through which 
heaven flows to earth, in short, in the fulness in 
which an ecstatical state takes place in him. It is 
pitiful to be an artist when by forbearing to be artists 
we might be vessels filled with the divine overflow- 
ings, enriched by the circulations of omniscience 
and omnipresence. Are there not moments in the 
history of heaven when the human race was not 
counted by individuals, but was only the Influenced, 
was God in distribution, God rushing into multiform 
benefit ? It is sublime to receive, sublime to love, 
but this lust of imparting as from us, this desire to 
be loved, the wish to be recognized as individuals, — 
is finite, comes of a lower strain. 

Shall I say, then, that, as far as we can trace the 
natural history of the soul, its health consists in the 
fulness of its reception, — call it piety, call it vene- 
ration — in the fact, that enthusiasm is organized 
therein. What is best in any work of art, but that 
part which the work itself seems to require and do ; 
that which the man cannot do again, that which 
flows from the hour and the occasion, like the elo- 
quence of men in a tumultuous debate ? It was 
always the theory of literature, that the word of a 



20 



poet was authoritative and final. He was supposed 
to be the mouth of a divine wisdom. We rather 
envied his circumstance than his talent. We too 
could have gladly prophesied standing in that place. 
We so quote our Scriptures ; and the Greeks so 
quoted Homer, Theognis, Pindar, and the rest. If 
the theory has receded out of modern criticism, it is 
because we have not had poets. Whenever they 
appear, they will redeem their own credit. 

This ecstatical state seems to cause a regard to the 
whole and not to the parts ; to the cause and not to 
the ends ; to the tendency, and not to the act. It 
respects genius and not talent ; hope, and not pos- 
session : the anticipation of all things by the intellect, 
and not the history itself ; art, and not works of art ; 
poetry, and not experiment ; virtue, and not duties. 

There is no office or function of man but is rightly 
discharged by this divine method, and nothing that 
is not noxious to him if detached from its universal 
relations. Is it his work in the world to study nature, 
or the laws of the world ? Let him beware of pro- 
posing to himself any end. Is it for use ? nature is 
debased, as if one looking at the ocean can remem- 
ber only the price of fish. Or is it for pleasure ? he 
is mocked : there is a certain infatuating air in woods 
and mountains which draws on the idler to want 
and misery. There is something social and intru- 
sive in the nature of all things ; they seek to pene- 
trate and overpower, each the nature of every other 
creature, and itself alone in all modes and throughout 
space and spirit to prevail and possess. Every star 



21 



in heaven is discontented and insatiable. Gravita- 
tion and chemistry cannot content them. Ever they 
woo and court the eye of every beholder. Every 
man who comes into the world they seek to fascinate 
and possess, to pass into his mind, for they desire 
to republish themselves in a more delicate world than 
that they occupy. It is not enough that they are Jove, 
Mars, Orion, and the North Star, in the gravitating 
firmament ; they would have such poets as Newton, 
Herschel and Laplace, that they may re-exist and 
re-appear in the finer world of rational souls, and fill 
that realm with their fame. So is it with all immate- 
rial objects. These beautiful basilisks set their brute, 
glorious eyes on the eye of every child, and, if they 
can, cause their nature to pass through his wonder- 
ing eyes into him, and so all things are mixed. 

Therefore man must be on his guard against this 
cup of enchantments, and must look at nature with 
a supernatural eye. By piety alone, by conversing 
with the cause of nature, is he safe and commands 
it. And because all knowledge is assimilation to 
the object of knowledge, as the power or genius of 
nature is ecstatic, so must its science or the descrip- 
tion of it be. The poet must be a rhapsodist : his 
inspiration a sort of bright casualty : his will in it 
only the surrender of will to the Universal Power, 
which will not be seen face to face, but must be 
received and sympathetically known. It is remark- 
able that we have out of the deeps of antiquity in 
the oracles ascribed to the half fabulous Zoroaster, a 
statement of this fact, which every lover and seeker 



22 



of truth will recognize. " It is not proper," said 
Zoroaster, " to understand the Intelligible with vehe- 
mence, but if you incline your mind, you will appre- 
hend it : not-too earnestly, but bringing a pure and 
inquiring eye. You will not understand it as when 
understanding some particular thing, but with the 
flower of the mind. Things divine are not attain- 
able by mortals who understand sensual things, but 
only the light-armed arrive at the summit." 

And because ecstasy is the law and cause of na- 
ture, therefore you cannot interpret it in too high 
and deep a sense. Nature represents the best mean- 
ing of the wisest man. Does the sunset landscape 
seem to you the palace of Friendship, — those pur- 
ple skies and lovely waters the amphitheatre dressed 
and garnished only for the exchange of thought and 
love of the purest souls ? It is that. All the other 
meanings which base men have put on it are con- 
jectural and false. You cannot bathe twice in the 
same river, said Heraclitus ; and I add, a man never 
sees the same object twice : with his own enlargement 
the object acquires new aspects. 

Does not the same law hold for virtue ? It is vi- 
tiated by too much will. He who aims at progress, 
should aim at an infinite, not at a special benefit. 
The reforms whose fame now fills the land with 
Temperance, Anti-Slavery, Non-Resistance, No 
Government, Equal Labor, fair and generous as each 
appears, are poor bitter things when prosecuted for 
themselves as an end. To every reform, in pro- 
portion to its energy, early disgusts are incident, 
so that the disciple is surprised at -the very hour 



of his first triumphs, with chagrins and sickness 
and a general distrust : so that he shuns his associ- 
ates, hates the enterprise which lately seemed so fair, 
and meditates to cast himself into the arms of that 
society and manner of life which he had newly aban- 
doned with so much pride and hope. Is it that he 
attached the value of virtue to some particular prac- 
tices, as, the denial of certain appetites in certain 
specified indulgences, and, afterward, allowing the 
soul to depart, found himself still as wicked and as 
far from happiness in that abstinence, as he had been 
in the abuse ? But the soul can be appeased not by 
a deed but by a tendency. It is in a hope that she 
feels her wings. You shall love rectitude and not 
the disuse of money or the avoidance of trade : an 
unimpeded mind, and not a monkish diet ; sympathy 
and usefulness, and not hoeing or coopering. Tell 
me not how great your project is, or how pure, — 
the civil liberation of the world, its conversion into 
a christian church, the establishment of public edu- 
cation, cleaner diet, a new division of labor and of 
land, laws of love for laws of property ; — I say to 
you plainly there is no end to which your practical 
faculty can aim, so sacred or so large, that, if pur- 
sued for itself, will not at last become carrion and 
an offence to the nostril. The imaginative faculty 
of the soul must be fed with objects immense and 
eternal. Your end should be one inapprehensible to 
the senses : then will it be a god always approached 
— never touched ; always giving health. A man 
adorns himself with prayer and love as an aim adorns 



24 



an action. What is strong but goodness, and what is 
energetic but the presence of a brave man ? The 
doctrine in vegetable physiology of the presence, or 
the general influence of any substance over and 
above its chemical influence, as of an alkali or a liv- 
ing plant, is more predicable of man. You need 
not speak to me, I need not go where you are, that 
you should exert magnetism on me. Be you only 
whole and sufficient, and I shall feel you in every 
part of my life and fortune, and I can as easily 
dodge the gravitation of the globe as escape your 
influence. 

But there are other examples of this total and 
supreme influence, besides Nature and the con- 
science. " From the poisonous tree, the world," 
say the Brahmins, " two species of fruit are pro- 
duced, sweet as the waters of life, Love or the 
society of beautiful souls, and Poetry, whose taste is 
like the immortal juice of Vishnu." What is Love, 
and why is it the chief good, but because it is an 
overpowering enthusiasm ? Never self-possessed or 
prudent, it is all abandonment. Is it not a certain 
admirable wisdom, preferable to all other advanta- 
ges, and whereof all others are only secondaries and 
indemnities, because this is that in which the indi- 
vidual is no longer his own foolish master, but inhales 
an odorous and celestial air, is wrapped round with 
awe of the object, blending for the time that object 
with the real and only good, and consults every omen 
in nature with tremulous interest. When we speak 
truly, — is not he only unhappy who is not in love ? 



25 



his fancied freedom and self-rule — is it not so much 
death ? He who is in love is wise and is becoming 
wiser, seeth newly every time he looks at the object 
beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind 
those virtues which it possesses. Therefore if the 
object be not itself a living and expanding soul, he 
presently exhausts it. But the love remains in his 
mind and the wisdom it brought him ; and it craves 
a new and higher object. And the reason why all 
men honor love, is because it looks up and not down ; 
aspires and not despairs. 

And what is Genius but finer love, a love imper- 
sonal, a love of the flower and perfection of things, 
and a desire to draw a new picture or copy of the 
same ? It looks to the cause and life : it proceeds 
from within outward, whilst Talent goes from with- 
out inward. Talent finds its models and methods 
and ends in society, exists for exhibition, and goes to 
the soul only for power to work. Genius is its own 
end, and draws its means and the style of its archi- 
tecture from within, going abroad only for audience 
and spectator, as we adapt our voice and phrase to 
the distance and character of the ear we speak to. 
All your learning of all literatures would never ena- 
ble you to anticipate one of its thoughts or expres- 
sions, and yet each is natural and familiar as house- 
hold words. Here about us coils forever the ancient 
enigma, so old and so unutterable. Behold ! there 
is the sun, and the rain, and the rocks : the old sun, 
the old stones. How easy were it to describe all 
this fitly: yet no word can pass. Nature is a 
4 



26 



mute, and man, her articulate speaking brother, lo ! 
he also is a mute. Yet when Genius arrives, its 
speech is like a river, it has no straining to describe, 
more than there is straining in nature to exist. When 
thought is best, there is most of it. Genius sheds wis- 
dom like perfume, and advertises us that it flows out 
of a deeper source than the foregoing silence, that it 
knows so deeply and speaks so musically because it 
is itself a mutation of the thing it describes. It is 
sun and moon and wave and fire in music, as astron- 
omy is thought and harmony in masses of matter. 

What is all history but the work of ideas, a record 
of the incomputable energy which his infinite aspi- 
rations infuse into man ? Has any thing grand and 
lasting been done ? — Who did it ? Plainly not any 
man, but all men : it was the prevalence and inun- 
dation of an idea. What brought the Pilgrims here ? 
One man says, civil liberty ; and another, the desire 
of founding a church ; and a third discovers that the 
motive force was plantation and trade. But if the 
Puritans could rise from the dust, they could not an- 
swer. It is to be seen in what they were, and not 
in what they designed : it was the growth, the bud- 
ding and expansion of the human race, and resem- 
bled herein the sequent Revolution, which was not 
begun in Concord, or Lexington, or Virginia, but was 
the overflowing of the sense of natural right in every 
clear and active spirit of the period. Is a man boast- 
ful and knowing, and his own master ? — we turn from 
him without hope ; but let him be filled with awe 
and dread before the Vast and the Divine which uses 



27 



him glad to be used, and our eye is riveted to the 
chain of events. What a debt is ours to that old 
religion which, in the childhood of most of us, still 
dwelt like a sabbath morning in the country of New 
England, teaching privation, self-denial and sorrow ! 
A man was born not for prosperity, but to suffer for 
the benefit of others, like the noble rock-maple which 
all around our villages bleeds for the service of man. 
Not praise, not men's acceptance of our doing, but 
the spirit's holy errand through us absorbed the 
thought. How dignified was this ! How all that is 
called talents and success in our noisy capitals be- 
comes buzz and din before this man-worthiness. 
How our friendships and the complaisances we use, 
shame us now ! Shall we not quit our companions, 
as if they were thieves and pot-companions, and 
betake ourselves to some desert cliff of mount Ka- 
tahdin, some unvisited recess in Moosehead Lake, to 
bewail our innocency and to recover it, and with it 
the power to communicate again with these sharers 
of a more sacred idea ? 

And what is to replace for us the piety of that 
race ? We cannot have theirs : it glides away from 
us day by day, but we also can bask in the great 
morning which rises forever out of the eastern sea, 
and be ourselves the children of the light. I stand 
here to say, Let us worship the mighty and tran- 
scendant Soul It is the office, I doubt not, of this 
age to annul that adulterous divorce which the su- 
perstition of many ages has effected between the 
intellect and holiness. The lovers of goodness have 



23 



been one class, the students of wisdom another, as 
if either could exist in any purity without the other. 
Truth is always holy, holiness always wise. I will 
that we keep terms with sin and a sinful literature 
and society no longer, but live a life of discovery 
and performance. Accept the intellect and it will 
accept us. Be the lowly ministers of that pure om- 
niscience, and deny it not before men. It will burn 
up all profane literature, all base current opinions, 
all the false powers of the world as in a moment of 
time. I draw from nature the lesson of an intimate 
divinity. Our health and reason as men needs our 
respect to this fact against the heedlessness and 
against the contradiction of society. The sanity of 
man needs the poise of this immanent force. His 
nobility needs the assurance of this inexhaustible 
reserved power. How great soever have been its 
bounties, they are a drop to the sea whence they flow. 
If you say, ' the acceptance of the vision is also the 
act of God:' — 1 shall not seek to penetrate the 
mystery, I admit the fdce of what you say. If 
you ask, « How can any rules be given for the attain- 
ment of gifts so sublime ?' — I shall only remark that 
the solicitations of this spirit, as long as there is life, 
are never forborne. Tenderly, tenderly, they woo 
and court us from every object in nature, from every 
fact in life, from every thought in the mind. The 
one condition coupled with the gift of truth is its 
use. That man shall be learned who reduceth his 
learning to practice. Emanuel Swedenborg affirmed 
that it was opened to him " that the spirits who knew 



29 



truth in this life, but did it not, at deatlrshall lose their 
knowledge." " If knowledge," said Ali the Caliph, 
" calleth unto practice, well ; if not, it goeth away." 
The only way into nature is to enact our best insight. 
Instantly we are higher poets and can speak a deeper 
law. Do what you know, and perception is con- 
verted into character, as islands and continents were 
built by invisible infusories, or as these forest leaves 
absorb light, electricity, and volatile gases, and the 
gnarled oak to live a thousand years is the arrest 
and fixation of the most volatile and etherial currents. 
The doctrine of this Supreme Presence is a cry of 
joy and exultation. Who shall dare think he has 
come late into nature, or has missed anything excel- 
lent in the past, who seeth the admirable stars of 
possibility, and the yet untouched continent of hope 
glittering with all its mountains in the vast West ? 
I praise with wonder this great reality which seems 
to drown all things in the deluge of its light 
What man seeing this, can lose it from his thoughts, 
or entertain a meaner &ubject? The entrance of 
this into his mind seems to be the birth of man. 
We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, 
but we know that it is divine. I cannot tell if these 
wonderful qualities which house to-day in this mor- 
tal frame, shall ever re-assemble in equal activity in 
a similar frame, or whether they have before had a 
natural history like that of this body you see before 
you ; but this one thing I know, that these qualities 
did not now begin to exist, cannot be sick with my 
sickness nor buried in any grave ; but that they cir- 



30 



culate through the Universe : before the world was, 
they were. Nothing can bar them out, or shut them 
in, but they penetrate the ocean and land, space and 
time, form and essence, and hold the key to univer- 
sal nature. I draw from this faith courage and hope. 
All things are known to the soul. It is not to be 
surprised by any communication. Nothing can be 
greater than it. Let those fear and those fawn who 
will. The soul is in her native realm, and it is wider 
than space, older than time, wide as hope, rich as 
love. Pusillanimity and fear she refuses with a beau- 
tiful scorn : they are not for her who putteth on her 
coronation robes and goes out through universal 
love to universal power. 



